Academia & Mental Health: Call for Guest Posts

Mental health in academia can be a complex and sometimes contradictory issue. On the one hand, doing a PhD and being an academic in your chosen field means you have the opportunity and the privilege not only to pursue a very specific personal interest but also that you have the influence to shape the area in which you work and contribute to determining what is worthy of academic investigation, teaching, and dissemination. In theory, this should be a great basis for your mental wellbeing. On the other hand, however, all these aspects are shaped, to a significant extent, by the structures which fund research and marketize higher education, as well as by an increasing number of doctoral graduates, many of whom aspire to secure one of the disproportionately few academic positions. And of course for many of us, what we do is deeply personal as well as professional, rendering certain boundaries between those realms intrinsically shaky in a higher education culture defined by permanent monitoring of your performance.

For postgraduates and early-career academics, the road to a permanent contract can be tough and mentally as well as physically taxing, both during their postgraduate study and in the period after their graduation, when many have to rely on short-term, hourly-paid teaching contracts and non-academic jobs to pay their bills while also attempting to further develop their CV in the pursuit of that permanent academic post. Admitting to stress, anxiety, or depression in these circumstances, especially in the early stages of your academic career, can lead to discrimination, and often the assumption that if you suffer from these mental health problems then, well, perhaps you’re just not good enough or cut out to be an academic (a suggestion, in my experience, often made by those in stable jobs, with stable incomes, and few or no debt concerns). I ask for your guest posts on your experiences of mental health issues – temporary or chronic, severe or minor – in the hope that your voices will contribute to the battle against this stigma, which too often associates mental health problems with incompetence and renders them something better to be kept silent.

This blog, then, looks to bring to light the variety of mental health issues experienced by postgraduates, early-career researchers, and established academics as well as being concerned more generally with the importance of self-care in an environment in which constant quantitative and qualitative assessment of our work has become customary and often runs counter to what we aim to achieve. But stress, anxiety, and depression caused by these circumstances are not the only concern of this new section of The New Academic. I also hope that your contributions will provide an insight into how academia deals with those who experience mental health problems, how hostile or supportive it is towards those individuals, be their problems related to their profession or not (see here for an interesting post by a lecturer who suffers from bipolar disorder, for example, and here for some resources compiled by Karen Kelsky in response to a request re academia and mental health). The aim is not to claim that mental illness is endemic in academia (or to insist that it is a sector more prone to mental health issues). Rather, I hope we can explore the links between the current academic and higher education environment and how we manage our wellbeing in that climate, be it as postgraduate students or professors. In this sense, then, I hope to counter the idea that academic life is necessarily fraught with these problems by highlighting also what people have done to take better care of their mental health (including developments such as this The Slow University seminar at Durham, for example). You can find an account of my own experiences of anxiety here.

Please email your guest posts and any questions or thoughts to me at admin@nadinemuller.org.uk. If you choose to have your guest post published anonymously, you can rest assured that none of your details will be shared with anyone but me. Posts should be approximately 1,000 words in length, but may be longer or shorter. The issues mentioned here are a great concern to many colleagues at various stages of their careers and for various reasons. Please consider sharing your stories, no matter your take on the topic!

Nadine is Senior Lecturer in English Literature and Cultural History at Liverpool John Moores University. Her research covers the literary and cultural histories of women, gender, and feminism from the nineteenth century through to the present day. She is currently completing a monograph on the Victorian widow (Liverpool University Press, 2018), and is leading War Widows' Stories, a participatory research and oral history project on war widows in Britain.

I’m Senior Lecturer in English Literature & Cultural History at Liverpool John Moores University and a BBC New Generation Thinker. I specialise in literary and cultural histories of women, gender, and feminism in Britain from the nineteenth century to the present day, women’s writing, and widowhood. I also provide support, training, and development for postgraduate and early-career researchers.

Some of the most common questions with which PhD researchers are concerned focus on how they should set their priorities during their doctoral studies. What else, and how much of it, should you do next to researching and writing your thesis? As so often, I can’t answer this for all PhD students in all disciplines, but I wanted to try and give you an overview of some useful starting points if you’re hoping to prepare yourself for the academic job market during your doctoral studies rather than after, particularly in the humanities and social sciences. So some of...

Interview feedback is difficult to approach, both giving and receiving. As someone who has more often been on the receiving end, I’ve found directly helpful feedback to be the exception rather than the rule. So, this post is about how to interpret feedback which might not tell you as much as you want. For me, there are three phases to thinking about the interview after the event. 1. Be honest with yourself When you come out of the interview, after you’ve taken a few deep breaths / had a shower / got home and had a stiff...

You’re close to submitting your PhD, to passing your viva voce examination with flying colours, and to be awarded your doctorate. At various stages in these final months of your existence as a PhD student certain scary thoughts – of the practical kind – enter your mind repeatedly and persistently. When will my university email account be closed? Should I be emailing academic colleagues from my embarrassingly named non-institutional email account? How will I keep researching and writing without physical or online access to my university library and its resources? How will I stand a chance on the...

Musings

On 11 November 2016, Mary Moreland and I launched the Heritage Lottery Funded project War Widows’ Stories live on Woman’s Hour. We were given eight star-struck minutes with BBC Radio 4’s Jenni Murray, and you can listen to the result on BBC iPlayer. It’s needless to say I was so excited about being able to do this. It meant our project was given national coverage on Armistice Day, a time when the nation is focused on remembrance of the dead, but often forgets about our duty to take care of those who survive conflict, including veterans and families. From...

I was invited to write this piece for the Times Higher Education blog, where it was originally published on 26 June 2016 under the title “‘I’m scared’: German academic in the UK on the Brexit vote”. You can read the original post here, and it is reproduced word for word, without alterations, below. I am an immigrant. Moving to the UK was a dream of mine ever since I can remember. England was, after all, home to bands like The Clash and The Vibrators, and this was as good a reason as any for a teenager to determine that her...

I had been meaning to apply for the AHRC/ BBC Radio 3 New Generation Thinkers initiative for a couple of years now, and last December I finally decided to take the time and fill in the application form. I proposed a programme on the history of widows in Britain, and explained the wider relevance of my research on this topic. The final section required applicants to write a review of a recent play, film, or book unrelated to their research that could be read on air. I offered a discussion of Maxine Peake’s play “Beryl” (2014), something which relates to...

When you’re ill, do you keep calm and carry on, or do you keep calm and take time off? I’ve just come to the end of two weeks sick leave. Shingles seriously knocked me out, even though I noticed it and got anti-viral medication on the very first day the rash appeared. It was the first time in my life that I’ve had to take sick leave for more than a day, and this, alongside my line manager’s kind encouragement to not come back until I was definitely better and pain-free, got me thinking. How many days had I spent...